"Breaking the law pales in comparison to getting rid of the pain," 161 brave cluster headache sufferers tell UK Home Office

Breaking the law pales in comparison to getting rid of the pain, 161 cluster headache sufferers from ClusterBusters UK tell Home Office ministers Sajid Javid and Kit Malthouse in an open letter asking politicians to reschedule psilocybin, backed by three top psychiatrists

Flying in the face of psilocybin’s Class A, Schedule 1 status in order to fight for symptom relief, the letter signed by 161 UK citizens has gone to Government ministers Sajid Javid (Secretary of State for Health and Social Care) and Kit Malthouse (Minister of State for Crime and Policing).

“Sadly, there are very few medications which offer any relief whatsoever, and those that do are short lasting at best but many, many people living with Cluster Headache have been successful in treating our condition with sub-hallucinogenic doses of psilocybin,” says the letter, which was written by ClusterBusters’ Vice President Ainslie Course.

Psilocybin shows unique promise for treating cluster headaches, the letter explains. The rare and debilitating deep brain neurological condition is dubbed ‘suicide headaches’ with reference to the desperation sufferers experience is currently incurable with existing treatments.

Psilocybin can also address the mental health consequences of living with this condition, the letter says: “Not only is this a way to treat the physical symptoms of our condition, but this medicine can also treat the associated mental ill health, that is the depression, anxiety and post traumatic stress related to knowing the excruciating pain will inevitably return.”

What about breaking the law? The pain of cluster headaches is “so incredibly debilitating that any risk pales in comparison,” Course reveals. “Psilocybin is helping hundreds of thousands of people to live a predominantly pain free life with encouragingly long periods of remission. This medicine has saved my life and the lives of many others.”

World renowned psychiatrists have written jointly on the same day in support of this suggestion to Savid Javid and Kit Malthouse. The psychiatrists’ letter was sent by Prof. Allan Young (President of the British Association for Psychopharmacology), Prof. Karl Friston (Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging), Prof Simon Weseley (Regius Professor of Psychiatry, Head of the Department of Psychological Medicine, King’s College, London). 

Conditions psilocybin can be used as an adjunct psychotherapeutic agent to treat include “anorexia nervosa, obesity, post traumatic stress disorder and addictions to alcohol, cocaine and tobacco,” the psychiatrists say. 

But psilocybin has value beyond its possible designations as a medicine. “When administered as a pharmacological challenge, changes in brain activity can be brought to light that inform our understanding of functional brain architectures and processing, advancing human knowledge and translational applications,” they continue, meaning that research with psilocybin can reveal vastly more than is currently known about the human brain, studies which are worth conducting on this basis alone.

But “[r]esearch into [psilocybin’s] potential—as a medicine and as an experimental tool—is all but foreclosed to numerous UK higher education institutions and businesses,” the psychiatrists say, as “[...] many institutions simply do not have the economic and temporal resources to secure the necessary licences.”

Prime Minister Boris Johnson approved the rescheduling of psilocybin to Schedule 2 in May 2021 in a meeting with Crispin Blunt MP, but Home Office delays relating to a misinterpretation of existing legislation have resulted in a hold-up that persists today.

Furthermore, psilocybin’s current Schedule 1 status is not based on scientific evidence and needs a review, the psychiatrists note: “The Government has confirmed that there has been no recent review of the evidence for psilocybin’s current scheduling.”

They call for the Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty to review the evidence that points to making the change: “Having assessed the evidence and history of this legislation ourselves, we understand that there is not and has never been an evidential basis for psilocybin’s current scheduling, based as it is on the UN Single Convention on Psychotropic Substances 1971. This is strange given the emerging evidence of psilocybin’s therapeutic potential and clear neuroscience research utility.” 

“Cluster headache sufferers hold guns to their heads routinely as they weather attacks of this ill-understood condition. Those who do know about it know all too well the pain that causes these to be known as ‘suicide headaches’.

“To keep in place the red tape that precludes further clinical knowledge of how this pain can be alleviated with psilocybin is to cement thousands in the UK between a rock and a hard place. Do they break the law to access a medicine that seems to work, or do they accept that the Home Office has consigned them to a life of suffering further preventable attacks?
”
— Crispin Blunt MP, unremunerated Chairman of the CDPRG

ClusterBusters UK is the national branch of the global ClusterBusters organisation based in the US which exists to improve the lives of those suffering from cluster headaches, which affect 1 in 1000 people in the UK. 
These open letters are part of the CDPRG’s Psilocybin Access Rights campaign, which coordinates the inter-departmental political conversation to lead to the rescheduling of psilocybin to remove the red tape obstructing lifesaving research with psilocybin.

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